christine ibbitson's blog

Keeping An Eye On Yourself

Interested in stalking yourself? The folks at ZabaSearch have created an interface that displays your current location in Google Map based on your IP address.

ZabaSearch says: "We provide this as a public service to allow web users to find out what specific information they broadcast while surfing the Net."

View cognisance report.

Firefox Extension: Rendered Source Chart

Firefox extension View Rendered Source Chart creates an illustration/chart that allows you to easily visualize the nested code of any web page.

This estension wil help you from getting lost in the maze of div’s, span’s and so on. View Rendered Source Chart lets you look at your source code the same way that a Right-Click -> View Source does, but it adds a really cool colored chart that shows you the nesting of elements inside your web page.

Find out more.

OK/Canel - Time Well Wasted

 It is so easy to get sidetrack and end up spending considerable amounts of time online doing and accomplishing nothing. I seem to spend quite a bit of time reading blogs that are interesting but often irrelevant to the knowledge that I am currently searching for. I was happy to come across a very entertaining and informative blog about this industry.

"OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. Our subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the industry of building interfaces - usability specialists, interaction designers, human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, industrial designers, etc."

An article accompanies each cartoon. The articles are honest, insightful and articulate ideas that are often being mulled over in most designer's heads.

Now if I can only remember what I was originally looking for.

Essential Mac OS X Applications

Mac Specialist has compiled a list of essential OSX applications. The app list is in alphabetical order with a brief description of each item.

Don't forget to check out the "What would you add to the list" comment section where users offer thier recommendations.

Blogging Software and Blog Basics

Interested in starting a blog? Not quite sure what publishing tool you should use?

The University of Southern California: Online Journalism Review has written an article called Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

The article explains the differnce between a hosted blog '"where all data and the publishing interface reside on the server of the blogging software company" and an independent blog "software that must be downloaded from the blogging software company and installed on a Web server."

Also included in the article: general information on blogging jargon, appearance and layout, tools, cost and launch time.

As a companion to the article, The Blog Software Comparison Chart outlines different standard features that allows users to compare various blog software such as Blogger, TypePad and Movable Type.

PageOpener Widget: Test Sites/Files in Different Browsers

PageOpener is a Dashboard widget that allows web developers to easily test thier files in various browsers. Just drag & drop a file or a url on it, select the browsers you want open the file and click GO to open it. Instruction Tip: Once you have installed PageOpener, click on the i in the lower right corner to flip to the back of the widget. Next, to add browsers to the list,  use Finder to locate the browser application, while the application is selected click on your defined keyboard shortcut to open your dashboard widgets. Drag the application to the right side of the PageOpener widget. If you try and drag it to the list area, it will not work.

OS X Icons

Bored with the default OS X icons? Just want to add some fun to the desktop? Check out PIXEL GIRL . Some of the themes include; cartoons, tools, food, animals or anime. You name it they probably got it. There are over 400 to chose from. No worries if you aren't using OS X, there are plenty of XP icons to choose from too.

 

ColorBlender Colour Palette Tool

Composing great colour palettes can be difficult. ColorBlender has created a free online tool for colour matching and palette design.

All you need to do is enter a single core colour and ColorBlender will build a 6-colour palette based around your entry.

No clue where to start? ColorBlender will load a random blend to get you on your way.

Each of the  ColorBlender swatch provides the HTML and RGB numbers for your convincence. Once you find a palette you like, you can download a Photoshop Colour Table (.ACT), Illustrator (.ESP) or name it, save it and email it to yourself.

It is easy to use, great results. Find out for yourself.

Troubleshooting Code

Recently I was required to figure out why the CSS and HTML files were not working after the client uploaded them to the server. He provided an edited HTML file as well as the current path to CSS.

Task: Compare the working original HTML file with the client’s edited HTML file.

Solution: Use a program that compares and highlights the differences between two files.

There are plenty of Freeware and Shareware programs that allow you to compare two documents. For instance TextDiff by Angus Johnson has customisable colour highlighting to illustrate the file difference, search and replace text, multiple undo/redo of text changes and generates a report of the file difference.

Something that might take hours to troubleshoot can be done in a jiff.

As it turned out it the HTML document type was not declared correctly.

Also recommended: A fresh pair of eyes.